AI Bright Spot: Assisting residents with an AI chatbot in Riverside, California

The Partnership for Public Service AI Center for Government® is publishing a series of blogs to celebrate how artificial intelligence and intelligent automation are being used by the government to serve the public.

We recently spoke with Prasad Mahale, deputy chief innovation officer for the City of Riverside, Calif., to discuss Rivy, the city’s new AI-powered chatbot and voice assistant designed to provide answers to common community questions and connect residents to city services.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What does Rivy do?

“Rivy is an AI-powered conversational assistant built specifically to guide our constituents through city services and quickly get them the information they need. Rivy is trained using publicly available city data.

“We currently offer two major interfaces for Rivy. One is a digital chat agent that residents can interact with online and the other is a voice agent seamlessly integrated into our 311-phone system. When residents call 311, they have the option to interact with the voice agent version of Rivy which shares the same carefully trained knowledge base and safety guardrails as the chat interface.”

Where did the idea for developing Rivy come from?

“It was a mix of responding to specific operational needs and a broader desire to improve the quality of government services. Automation isn’t new to us. For more than a decade, we have actively focused on modernizing and improving our business processes. Today, we are looking at how we can use AI to take those automations to the next level.

“Strategically, our executive leadership has focused on modernizing processes and cutting down wait times for public services, all while ensuring these resources remain fully accessible to everyone. As these AI tools have become available, our approach has been purpose driven. We are focusing on specific use cases where AI adds real efficiency as opposed to using the technology just for the sake of using it.

“When analyzing our 311 system’s call volume, we saw a tremendous opportunity. Riverside is a vibrant community with hundreds of civic programs, but navigating such a vast array of services can be a challenge. We receive over 100,000 service calls annually, and nearly half are simply residents seeking general information that is publicly available but scattered across our extensive city website. We built Rivy to break down those information silos. By providing these answers directly to users around the clock, we reduce routine call volume so our employees can focus on complex service requests.”

What did the process look like testing Rivy before public deployment?

“To prepare Rivy for public use, we led an extensive process to develop the tool’s capabilities and guardrails. To ensure strict adherence to our data governance procedures, we only permitted public-facing data that was already available on the Riverside city website to train the model.

“We then piloted the system internally to our approximately 2,700 city employees. These employees served as our initial testers, prompting the chatbot with various questions and requests so we could evaluate the responses for accuracy. We made sure every department had the opportunity to participate in this testing phase. To ensure the highest level of quality, our 311 team extensively tested the tool by simulating the real-world questions they receive from residents every day.

“During this soft launch, several scenarios emerged that even our internal experts had not anticipated. For example, we saw users trying to use Rivy to answer their homework. This encouraged us to secure firm guardrails to ensure the AI’s responses focus solely on city services and resources. Now, if someone asks Rivy to complete a homework assignment, it intelligently provides instructions for accessing the city library’s homework assistance services instead. Additionally, if residents ever need more help than the AI can provide, they can always ask Rivy to transfer their chat or voice call to a live agent during business hours.

“Rivy’s public launch was not the end of our evaluation process. We continue to analyze the AI’s intent classification and response quality to ensure it provides accurate and up-to-date information. This ongoing monitoring gives us the opportunity to revise content on our website and retrain Rivy to fill any identified information gaps.”

What are the success metrics you are using to evaluate Rivy?

“On the chat agent side, we are tracking overall engagement volume alongside response accuracy. We specifically evaluate the percentage of questions the AI answers correctly based on our verified city data. Currently, the chat agent successfully matches a resident’s request to the correct city resource 98.7% of the time, proving it to be a highly reliable tool for our community.

“For the voice agent, we actively monitor our adoption rate, which measures the number of callers who choose the AI over a live agent when prompted at the start of a call. Right now, that adoption rate is 9%. When residents engage with the voice agent, we see an 89.9% first call resolution rate, meaning Rivy answers their questions satisfactorily. The remaining volume represents our escalation rate, which tracks the calls smoothly transferred from Rivy to a live human agent.”

Is there anything else you’d like to share about Rivy?

“As the system matures, we will expand our ongoing voice key performance indicators to include wait time reduction, measuring the overall decrease in the average speed of answer for our staff. We will also track our queue deflection rate, which counts the number of callers who choose to leave a live wait queue to speak with Rivy instead. Finally, beyond the hard data, we monitor general social media to gauge resident sentiment and actively collect feedback about the tool at our community events.

“We actively seek out this community feedback because continuous improvement is the foundation of our technology strategy. If a resident highlights a concern, such as an incomplete transfer to a live agent during a call, our team addresses it immediately to ensure the resident gets the information and support they need.

“Ultimately, the true success isn’t just about the technology itself or empowering city departments to use AI to build operational efficiency. It is about building constituent trust in modern tools. At the same time, we recognize that technology isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. We will always have a live person available during regular business hours to speak with residents, ensuring our city services remain truly accessible to our entire community.”

Thank you for chatting with us, Prasad!

Interested in trying out Rivy for yourself? Visit the City of Riverside’s website!

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Continuing the conversation   

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